Dark sky proponents mull the rights of nature to battle light pollution. Here's how it would work
The technicolor Florida sunset had faded into darkness, and my extended family, assembled from two continents and three countries, gathered on the beach at Longboat Key to look at the stars. We were incredibly lucky that night in 1984, when I was seven, because a satellite came into view. With no clouds and few lights, it moved steadily like a bright little star across the dark, dark sky. We oohed. We ahhed. Today, some laypeople may still gather to watch a gaggle of newly-launched Starlink satellites, each designed for a lifetime of about 5 years, as they move through the sky like a string of pearls, or a long ellipse of unblinking stars. But the satellites are common enough these days that they often zip through the field of view of astronomers' telescopes, and their radio signals interfere with the signals used by those telescopes. With sunlight reflecting off their solar sails, at times satellites can be brighter than the stars that, from our viewpoint, surround them, and there are enough of them to brighten the night sky. There is little regulation of such space sources of light pollution. And work to better regulate and limit terrestrial, or ground-based, light pollution, while showing some promising results, is still in its infancy. Could an increasingly popular, intermittently successful legal argument involving what's called the Rights of Nature or more-than-human rights possibly reclaim our planet's dark skies? It sounds like a goth dream, but do we have a legal right to darkness? Is light pollution really that bad? It's a small step from annoyance to menace. While satellites offer many benefits, including environmental data gathering, with hundreds of thousands satellites expected to swarm the skies within the decade, we are looking at a genuine threat to the nighttime darkness within which we, and all living things, evolved over hundreds of thousands, in fact millions, of years. Not that satellites are the only concern. Light pollution from…